Privacy and the database state in the news

Ad-blocking software is ‘worse than Superfish’

Jane Wakefield reports on the BBC News website that researchers have identified a threat to browser security from software designed to block advertisements.

PrivDog, a tool designed to block ads and replace them with ones from “trusted sources” has been found to compromise a layer of the internet known as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) which is used to safeguard online transactions. It follows the discovery of a similar problem with Superfish software pre-installed on some Lenovo computers.

PrivDog said in a statement issued on 23rd Feb 2015:

The potential issue is not present in the PrivDog plug-in that is distributed with Comodo Browsers and Comodo has not distributed this version to its users. There are potentially a maximum of 6,294 users in the USA and 57,568 users globally that this could potentially impact.

“The potential issue has already been corrected. There will be an update tomorrow, which will automatically update all 57,568 users of these specific PrivDog versions.”